The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Loki
I have never had this much trouble reviewing anything.
This show has proven to be a unique struggle for me. It’s truthfully a bad show but it’s challenging for me to say exactly why because Loki has been so difficult for me to remember.
I’m getting what few thoughts I’m capable of having about this show down now before I run the risk of having to watch it a second time and I’m not doing that!
One of my problems with Loki is that something needs to take place in order for me to have an opinion on it. Nothing happened for five freaking damn weeks. In the last episode, something did and I am willing to say… Astonishingly enough… It was actually good.
The show was not Woke this time. Loki wasn’t getting kicked in the balls by strong whamen every five minutes, that was a nice change. The production quality in terms of costuming, sound design, and music was from 2013 Marvel as opposed to 2023 Marvel. It was excellent all the way around and certainly better than Antman 3 and light years better than The Marvels. The cinematography and special effects were outstanding.
Girl Loki was relegated to the back of the bus. Sylvie was one of Victoria Alonso’s “pissed-off lesbians with a huge chip on her shoulder.” There really wasn’t that much for her to do this time around and surprisingly, they didn’t bother with having her do something that meant nothing. This season was Loki’s show.
The story concentrates on Loki’s redemption arc. Here’s the setup (I can’t really call it a plot) the newly created alternate timelines are being destroyed. The TVA whose job had been to destroy variant timelines is deeply upset with this for reasons that I don’t understand.
The TVA thinks that the Time Loom can fix this multiverse-destroying issue but they can’t make it work for most of the series and the TVA is eventually destroyed.
Loki for his part becomes unstuck in time and begins traveling randomly back and forth along his own timeline
I’m going to skip to the end because it’s the only part of the show where anything happens. Loki gains control of his time slippage and begins trying to fix the Time Loom. Loki lives thousands of years within the span of his life repeatedly going back to earlier points in his timeline to try and fix the Time Loom. Basically, it’s a controlled Ground Hog’s Day.
He eventually finds out from Kang that the Time Loom is functioning perfectly. It was built from the ground up to be a failsafe device that in an emergency such as the death of Kang, will destroy all timelines except the Sacred Timeline.
Finally, Loki has lived long enough that he becomes as powerful as Kang. He destroys the Time Loom, gathers the disparate timelines literally into his hands, and turns himself into Yggdrasil the Norse world tree. He is finally a god and has been “burdened with glorious purpose.”
It was kind of good and gave Loki an end to his redemption character arc. As well as giving Tom Hiddleston an exit strategy from the MCU.
The issue here is that there were so many other problems with this series. First and foremost, this was not actually a TV show it was a six-hour movie, with four and half hours of filler in the middle. It’s just unwatchable at that length.
The casting is a holdover from the first season, so it’s not this season’s fault but it’s still there and it’s still drastically uneven. You have Shakespearean-trained actor Tom Hiddleston in the lead. Next to him is Owen Wilson, who always plays personable characters and is able to keep up with Hiddleston by charisma if nothing else. But the rest of the cast is TV-grade actors and I’ll include former flavor of the month, Jonathon Majors in that assessment. The level of talent is just shotgunned all over the place.
I am in the strange position of saying there are undoubtedly people who enjoyed this show and weren’t drinking the SJW Kool-Aid in order to do so. But I’m not one of them, the whole of the work is far too flawed to be redeemed by the ending, no matter the quality of it.
My primary problem with this season is that in the sixth episode, you suddenly find out that you didn’t need to watch the other five hours of this seaon. The five-minute recap at the start of the episode would have had you up to speed on everything you had to know to understand the climax.
Five-sixths of Loki Season Two is utterly pointless.
Normally, my rule of thumb is that if there is a reason to watch a given thing, then I will give it a Recommends with Reservations rating. But in this case, I can not do that because there is so much pointless dross that has to be waded through in order to reach the few flakes of gold at the bottom of the pan.
Consequently…
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Loki Season 2
